Add two reminder notifications for each calendar entry. One for a 24 hour reminder and on for a 7 days reminder.

In order for these reminders to work you would need a special php page that can be called by a cron job I guess.

hi mariuss.

Thank you for your suggestion.

Although I planned to send e-mail by cron, reminder by calendar entry would be good idea too.

Both should be implemented.

Hello,

Did this ever make it into piCal? Currently using Yahoo calendar and want to move to piiCal, but need the notifications. Using it as a group vacation calendar and want to be notified the day of with a list of calendar entries.

Thanks,
Brad

I too could use a "reminder" function and am willing to partially fund the development of it for PiCal and the XOOPs community.

Ideally the new "reminder" function would work like this:

Admin sets the reminder specifications:
Number of days in advance of event to send messages.
Intro text at the top of the auto email

Registered users can then subsribe to an auto email reminder for
A specific event only
All events in a specific category
All events in the calendar
And users can modify their subscriptions anytime as they wish.
Cron tab checks and sends messages as required.

Anybody up for the challenge?

Count me in, i've been looking at the code for quite a while and could make some efforts... we introduced pical to our local intranet 15 days ago and recently converted it into a personal employee agenda by hacking some code, nothing too impressive, but still worth the try... (forum: Individualize Calendar Events)

We are very interested in Xoops Developement and many other details..
Don hesitate to contact me.

Pedro Manuel Guillem
Bayes Forecast (Madrid)
pmguillem@bayesinf.com

Great. I've been in contact with Marc-Andr

It is not so difficult to implement the feature of "reminder", if the server allows "cron" to you.

Anyway, I don't have time to develop it now.

I plan to have Marcan do the development work for the reminder feature cron tab.

I'll let you know how it goes.

He may be in touch...

Here are my outline specifications for the piCal reminder feature.

Let me know if you have any suggestions, additions, recommendations, or warnings. Thanks.

======
Admin sets the reminder specifications:
a. Number of days in advance of events to send messages.
b. Intro text at the top of the auto email (e.g., "you are receiving this message because you subscribed.....")
c. Auto email subject (e.g., "WBF Event Reminder")

Registered users can then subscribe to an auto email reminder for
a. A specific event only
b. All events in a specific category
c. All events in the calendar
d. Users can modify their subscriptions anytime as they wish.

Crontab checks (once or twice a day?) and sends messages as required.

Make it all Multilanguage compatible.
Use as much XOOPs existing core as possilbe. - emailer, notifications, etc.
=======

A suggestion.

Instead of having notifications for a whole category or the whole calendar I would create only to type of notifications for events. An early one (typically a week) and a short one (typically one day). Both number of days should be configurable in the admin area.

I have seen this type of notifications at Yahoo Groups and they work pretty well.

Notifications for a category or the whole calendar don't make much sense in my opinion.

Thanks for making this happen.

Marius

I agree that the "whole calendar" notification is probably overkill.

But if we are building this thing, might as well make it as flexible as possible.

For a simply piCal installation, the "whole calendar" is an easy way for a user to get reminded.

For a fairly complex piCal install with loads of categories, still thing a "for this category" would be useful.

My first use for this feature will be a School District site - Union City. Having the ability to do categories, or in this instance an entire school, would be useful to parents.

I'll keep you posted on our progress.

We're now working on the Event Reminders hack for piCal.

Here is what the piCal module will do with Marcan's modifications :

- A user will be able to subscribe to a new notification allowing him to be
notified xx Days before an event start. (XX will be customizable as a config option.) This notification could be set for all events (Global Reminder), for a specific category (Category Reminder) or for a specific event (Event Reminder).

- A cron job will have to be set to be executed each day, for example at
00:00 AM.

- At that time, a script will be executed.

- This script will list all events starting in the next 24 hours.

- It will then list all users who subscribed to the Global Reminder
notification and will send them a notification for each event listed
previously

- The script will then list all users who subscribed to the Category
Reminder notification and will send them a notification for each event
corresponding to the category they subscribed for.

- Finally, it will list all users who subscribed to the Event Reminder and
will send them a notification for each event.

- The text of the notification will use a mail template that you could
customize in piCal/language/english/mail_template

- Unfortunately, the notification cannot be sent in the language of the user
as the way the notification architecture is currently, this cannot be done.
The notification will be sent in 1 language. (default site language). However, the workaround for this is to put as many languages as necessary in the one mail template. For example :

-----French-----
Voici la notification en fran軋is....

-----English Version-----
Here is the notification text in english....

- The XOOPS notification architecture will be used as a base for this so
users can subscribe and unsubscriibed to these notifications as they
normally do.

The above will be accomplished with the budget we have. Hopefully within the next few weeks.

If others are willing to contribute some funds to our budget we could also accomplish the following:

- Users who susbcribed to both a global and a category reminder will receive notifiations twice. This could be prevented in the script. If only we had more budget.

- Add two reminder notifications options, both admin configurable: One for advance timeframe (like 1 day) and one for a longer period of time (like 7 days). Again if we just had some more money.

Did I mention we need some more contributions from the community?

Did anything ever come of this? I went over to TheSmartFactory and saw no mention of this project. I posted the question there and got no answer.

jp

Well, it looks like this project dead-ended; I see nothing anywhere and I'm getting no response from posting.

So, I'm toying with this myself now, and I've hit a small design issue that I'd like an opinion on.

The xoopsnotifications table contains a column called not_itemid that is supposed to hold the key to a row in whatever table of whatever it is that you want to be notified about; a sort of dynamic-pseudo-foreign-key. It is defined as an UNSIGNED MEDIUMINT.

In this case, we want to hold a notification for a piCal event. The pical_event table has a key that is defined as an UNSIGNED INT AUTO_INCREMENT.

So, the issue is that the largest value xoopsnotifications.not_itemid can hold is 16,777,215 whereas the pical_event.id field can have a key as large as 4,294,967,295.

The issue exists right now; you have the ability to request notification of comments added to a given event and you have the ability to request notification of new events globally (though that doesn't seem to be working; I've subscribed to that and don't get notified when someone enters a new event). The notification of comments stores the pical_event.id value in xoopsnotifications.not_itemid.

I'd like an opinion on if I should degrade pical_event.id to UNSIGNED MEDIUMINT (seems the least risky), promote the xoopsnotifications.not_itemid to UNSIGNED INT (*SHOULD* be benign, but this *IS* a system table so it makes me nervous), or quit obsessing (not my nature ).

What do you think?

JP

Sorry. Been "nose to the grind stone"

We did finish this up with the SmartFactory.

I'll see if we can't have them post the piCal Reminder Hacks for public consumption.

No problem and good to hear it was completed.

Looking forward to seeing it.

JP